film the cinema and movies according to Pat Hartman

Harry Partch and Kenneth Anger

Did Harry Partch, as has been reported in various places, actually score the first version Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome? Yes and no. The consensus seems to be that he was an unwilling participant. Anger may have edited the film to the rhythms of Partch’s Plectra and Percussion Dances, but when the composer was approached for permission he refused to be associated with the project, and Anger had to make another plan. Here are some miscellaneous remarks about it.

Underground Film by P. Adams Sitney mentions the four different versions of the film. “The first, which no one to my knowledge has seen, was edited to a sound track by Harry Partch.”

“Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome of 1954 was originally meant to have a soundtrack by the eccentric avant-garde composer Harry Partch, who then withdrew the permission to use it.” Phil Johnson said this in a 2001 article in The Independent, although nobody else seems to be saying that any permission had ever been given in the first place.

Thomas Draschan says the film was “initially conceived by Anger as having the music of Harry Partch …Partch, however, did not give Anger permission to use his Plectra and Percussion Dances as the film’s soundtrack. Anaïs Nin tried to persuade her musician friend that there was a close affinity between the film and his music, but it was no use.” Draschan says Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass was what Anger “eventually ended up choosing to fill the space left by Partch’s refusal.”

According to Bob Gilmore’s biography of Harry Partch, in the spring of 1954 there was correspondence between him and Kenneth Anger on this topic. Partch, with reluctance that might have been based on the subject matter or might have been more general, said no, and backed it up with a legalistic letter to Anger from someone associated with the trust fund that had been established to finance Partch’s work.

In an interview with Scott McDonald, filmmaker Stan Brakhage said, “I was involved in the attempts that Kenneth made to have Harry Partch do the sound track for Inauguration. But Harry was just so offended by the movie.” For more information on this failure to connect, see Cinema 16: Documents toward a history of the Film Society, pages 227 – 234

Philip Blackburn, the major chronicler of Partch’s life, says of Partch, “His singular vision and aesthetic led to notorious spats with the likes of… Kenneth Anger. Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome misappropriated Partch’s Plectra and Percussion Dances in 1954.” In another context Blackburn says, “…film efforts that appropriated Partch’s music without honoring his total concept of integration met with stern warnings, as producers Kenneth Anger and Ian Hugo found out.”